Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
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Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
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In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.